Working with LongJump in Cloud Computing

LongJump is a division of Relationals, Inc., a privately held provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) business applications to more than 150 enterprise companies employing cloud computing services. The company is leveraging its platform to move into the platform as a service market — specifically for companies who are building private clouds. Therefore, it assumes that development will take place inside a private data center or inside one of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments (Amazon, RackSpace, and so on).

The company offers a Java-based development suite that includes a plug-in to the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). LongJump’s PaaS environment enables developers to use services that it calls Building Blocks. These services include objects, scripts, component extensions, business logic, data policies, and workflows.

A developer uses LongJump’s platform to create Building Blocks that can then be reused for other purposes. For example, a single contract object and its records can be created and reused by business teams such as sales, business development, compliance, legal, and finance by simply modifying data policies and workflows.

The new LongJump Development Suite includes the following components:

A visual browser-based user interface for data and process modeling, as well as advanced coding and scripting features for developers who are familiar with Java. That way they can enhance and extend applications or completely create new data models and processes from scratch.

LongJump provides a set of Web services as a technique to allow services to communicate and pass data from one to the other (using SOAP and REST APIs to connect to external systems or platforms). When LongJump objects are extended, those fields are immediately available for integration with SOAP and REST APIs, workflow processes, and the built-in report creation wizard.

Development Suite features include Java development tools (including JSP and HTML-based code), AJAX library, and data model definitions. It includes plug-in to a standard Eclipse IDE.

LongJump offers its development platform free to existing customers of its packaged applications. After an application is built on the platform, LongJump has a three-tiered pricing model.

LongJump offers a free evaluation version.

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